


Stifled

by cordialcount



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: F/M, Femdom, Knifeplay, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 11:05:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's always loved a good dinner scene—all the better if it comes with his just deserts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stifled

The linens are white, the wine, the Regent's face—all the way to milk-wrapped Theodora at the man's left hand, smiling as only bastions of pure ladyhood know how to do. The curtains hang free. Berkut imagines an engineer peering in: eyes traveling over this delight of a dinner party to the Duchess and then to him, an arm's length away, close enough to slice the flower from her hat. Planning this isn't the same as seeing it, however, and the evidence of butchery all about her cuts a chasm even he is reluctant to cross. It's her tranquility. He can't hide his relish when he kills. 

So it isn't his fault that the coiffed bell of her hair makes him want to crawl between her legs and lick the calm off her face. She just shot six people with his Nagant. He wants to thrust it into her and threaten her with the last round. He'd force her to la petite mort tightening around the barrel, write the heady understanding of Death so near into her brows, her eyes, her tongue. But when she turns to him she doesn't say _my hunter, we're alive, fuck me_. She says, "Oh, Berkut, did you find this interesting?"

He shrugs. "You know my tastes, your Highness."

"Do I?" The glass rises in her hand. He stares at the curve of her wine as she drinks and pulls her chair aside, looking anywhere but the lines of her body. "You've changed, lately. This Klaus. Who is he to you?"

The thought of dispatching that bastard really does not help his arousal. "He's only important insofar as he's going to lead their contingent. They wouldn't send their own out to this wasteland. I'll remove him for you."

"Of course," she says. Never a thank you.

She glides toward him before he's expecting it. Usually layers of fur coat separate them even when she feels like Jezebel. She is pale and clean as water and the sun is out, and he still has two cabinet members and a carful of guards to slaughter; he cannot afford to be snowblind. The wall comes up cold against his back far too quickly while she stares at him, no tension at all in the set of her shoulders. 

"I'll—go clean up."

The shake in his voice appalls him. He has no chance with her if he cannot match her surety, but she smiles at him like this is one in a long series of indulgences that will end some distant day. "Godspeed," she says. He does not run.

 

* * *

 

Theodora keeps the names of all her dogs—Berkut can hear his rolling out with the vowels and half-breathed r's of the upper crust, effortlessly commanding. He leaves that privilege to her. The officer who brings her note is just another nameless imbecile he'll have to shoot before they disembark.

The fatal departure of most of the train's passengers has left many compartments open. Berkut occupies two on his own, mostly to be able to walk one to the next and still be in his own domain, stamped with his own boot prints and baubles and cologne. Such details satisfy and distract him from his lack of control in other areas. "Your presence is requested by 0830," for example. It might well read "Drop your little affairs, boy," which should be infuriating, given how many years he's schemed other people's asses off to enjoy rank on his own missions. It disturbs him, then, that his first reaction isn't _how can I best skewer this paper?_ but instead the knowledge that his trousers feel too tight for him, and yet some compulsion stops him from solving that with the ten minutes he can remain in his bed. "You may go," he says, putting as much _must_ into it as possible so the messenger will scurry off. He'll have to consider this order. The Duchess has always been casual with him. If she wanted to see him immediately, she would have opened his door and swept in herself.

Nine minutes later, he curses, straps on his gear and stomps out.

 

* * *

 

"Berkut," she says, and he likes her playing at sunbeams, but this is how he admires her best: her voice rhotic and hard and sly, the last moment before a bullet exits the chamber. Her uncovered limbs are all over the sofa like an untamed cat. "Berkut. Why did you bring weapons?"

"I live to serve." He cracks a stiff knuckle to emphasize the sardonic note.

"Your targets are dead."

 _Not quite_ , he thinks. Not with the train plowing toward the Reizen rose. "Never claim I am without claws."

"Yes, you wouldn't be half so useful without them. What do you find them best for?"

"Cutting your enemies up."

She arches one brow at that—the only real movement so far on her knife-sharp face that slackens not even for murder. "Lend me your hands," she says, beckoning him with a wriggle of her foot. He steps forward until he's intruding enough within her space that he can smell musk rising off her neck. Her fingers close around his. Her position compels him to bend so she can unbutton his coat with his own fingers. He leans over until he's about to collapse into her ermine collar, finds himself with no choice but to kneel as she slaps his hands away and in the same deceiving movement unsheathes his daggers from his hips.

"Your Highness—"

"Theodora," she says. "After all, we're intimate, aren't we? You just offered to let me cut you."

And her heel wraps to the back of his knee, paralyzing his soft flesh, before he can counter that logic with something similarly absurd. _I'm not your enemy!_ Then he panics and tries to punch anywhere dispensable as pain rips up his leg. The blunt end of one dagger connects with his collarbone. Berkut's stretching his arm back like a hammer when the second blow falls: this is his Duchess, his princess, who shortened the throne line before her hours ago, and he just proved her words. That instant where he thought of her as only a first name could mean his head on city gates if it amuses her.

"I think you agree?" It is so beautifully done he wants her, as unquestionably and unstoppably as he wanted the siren at the banquet of the dying, and he shakes while she hooks her ankle around his back and ruffles his hair. "Come, I rather like your teeth."

So he opens his mouth and lets her run the blade around his tongue. Not let so much as that he's not sure how experienced she is, he doesn't want to increase the risk by moving. He longs to hold the damn things himself to carve Theodora's cold heart out of her chest. But although goosebumps unfurl down his arms she's not frozen any longer contemplating him silent on his knees, her breasts visibly flushing as she clears one hand to open her coat, and he would rather stare at the impossible skin of her thighs. _She undressed for me,_ he thinks, as she draws one last lazy ellipse in blood inside his cheeks. _She can melt._

He spits as soon as the point clears his lips. She laughs. "So your tongue is mine, dear eagle. Pity you haven't a snake's instincts. I would appreciate the forks. Go on, feed," she says, smiling at how obviously hard he has been while the blade passed inches from his throat. Humans have long learned to cage every beast of land and air; the touch of her pomegranate nails to his shoulder jesses him as securely as any rope. "I've more for you than even you could devour."

He feels more than chooses his head falling foward and his eyes closing. His hands settle around the lean muscle of her right leg; she straightens so the polished leather of her boots rubs against his chest, following the lines of his scars. He licks slowly through her curls and she combs through his hair and shoves him into her cunt. The boot's toe has some platform, something rough by which he can trace it running down his body, a little pain whenever he licks her correctly: her legs will clamp around his head, holding him struggling for breath as she kicks at him. "Give me a good reason not to kick your eye, too," she murmurs. Airless and sightless he curls his tongue into her until her sweat eases the skid of her legs along his shoulders.

Not that his face isn't sticky too. His lady heats his cheeks almost unbearably, half from how hot and wet he's made her and half from the understanding that he, Berkut, fighter pilot and royal weapon, is currently pressing his mouth to a Duchess' cunt. That he delights in it. For a few seconds he worries she's so lost she'll choke him, but when his lips circle over her clit and suck it out of its hood she relaxes. She _is_ Theodora, after all, she gets off on the presence of danger, the possibility of his bite. Then she jams her knees under his arms and drags him up to her chest. How badly his cock jumps when he focuses on the slope of her breasts! Theodora usually wreathes herself in wool and fur up to her chin. "Hell," he says, looking at her entirely bare, a shimmering line of her own slick highlighting the curve of her hips and waist. "Why do we bother negotiating? Walk up to the manor and take it."

"Shut up and remove my boots." The cold leather is driven into his mouth with the point. "They have taboos we don't."

"Never was one not worth break—"

—and he stumbles as he glances at her pleased, power-hungry face. He meant to talk about Klaus, about the political implications of all the taboos that obtuse hulk probably smashed through, but this is fine, her unbooted feet nestling around his throat like all his training has left him no better than a footrest.

"I'm sure even your sense of propriety wouldn't stretch to having your vices scratched across your forehead," she says, taking up the dagger again. "Shall I? And don't even think about it." Steels brushes far too close to his wrist as he attempts to elbow open her legs. A frisson of charge surfaces in his neck, short-circuits the usual nervous system straight to his cock. "Here. Would you like to be inside me?"

When was he ever chilly? The shivers jumping about him now are from warmth and the trembling in every nerve that wants to either fuck her to hell or flense that smirk off every inch of her skin. "Theodora," he breathes.

"You're going to hold your fingers up," she says. "Then you're going to hold still, and I'm going to lower myself on your gloves until I come."

"Why should I cooperate with that?" He ducks under her arm and tries to tongue her nipple, wondering if every part of her tastes equally triumphant, if you could bottle up the scent that makes her the Princess and anoint commoners with it, drop by drop.

"If you move at all, you might find a bit of yourself gone." The cheshire grin flicks out again. "Besides, don't pout. Open the window. You can watch."

Most of his energy has to be devoted to not moving while she fingers herself— _was I not good enough?_ —although enough remains to boil in his chest. It's day, now, the light through glass focused unerringly on the best parts of her, which is to say everywhere. If they weren't driving through a subterranean graveyard and this were sunlight that fell upon the living, everyone should be off being productive, or listening to the latest broadcasts, or ravishing someone else into the mattress and staring slack-jawed at their partner. But then Theodora sinks onto him smooth as whiskey and he knows they'd still have eyes for her. She is a woman to raise ghosts. The first girl he ever had tosses Theodora's gleam-bronzed curls and slim shoulders, says "breathe" to him, dark and cruel and shrewd. He has indeed forgotten to do so. He wants to dissolve into a pool of lust.

He hates his gloves.

Can't feel her on his fingers, even though the shine she leaves on the leather as she rises cords the muscles in his arms. He half-crouches against the sofa, his head on the velvet cushion, her thighs spread so wide they can't even touch. The space between them is the width of a matchstick and as fundamental as wood and ash. For Berkut, there's something primordially wrong about having sex with a beguiling woman who won't let him near enough to touch.

That's why he does it. The breaking of taboos.

It's not because she arches back and he follows her, hungry, so he's angled four fingers in to the knuckles. It's not because she kisses him eyes dark and narrowed like she doesn't care enough to do it right. He has to explore the space around her tongue himself, delineate the ridge of her palate over which she gives him orders and he curses in every language in Eurote _you, you, fucking you_. It's not because she lets him press his chest against hers, finally. He manages to wrest a decent position for his cock along the cushion lining—

Her mouth comes away from his. "No," she says. That's how she comes, ramming herself against the fingers that don't feel like his with so much force he can't find friction, commanding him against his will.

Maybe it's not like that. Maybe he watches the soft pink folds of her cunt dribble onto his gloves and even glazed he curses having to clean them off tomorrow: it wouldn't do to meet Reizen with his sovereign's discharge passing by handshake. Maybe he even giggles at it, and her Adam's apple bobs as she titters right back at him and drops a dagger behind the sofa. Or he can't help but notice all the stains. Theodora isn't supposed to be having sex with him, even sex both as abridged and as relentless as her rubbing her clit against his sweaty wrist. He gets a part of her tongue clenched in his teeth at first and tries to apologize into her nostrils. His toes itch something fierce because she never told him to take off _his_ boots. And etcetera. What matters is that before he breaks his oaths and slams her against the wall, she comes.

"All right," she says. Her voice seems to have fought a deep gravity well to reach her mouth. "You."

"I," he says, his balls so tight he's shocked he can't come just by a glimpse of her lazy sprawl alone, "will—"

Theodora looks at him like he's just suggested nuclearing the Easterners out of existence; which, admittedly, has been one of his past suggestions, but it's an expression at odds with the otter-sleek gratification of seconds ago. "Kneel. You'll be using this," she says. The boot he flung away lands at his feet. "That should be fine."

He throws what could be charitably called a tantrum. Frustration coils from the veins of his cock to the tips of his ears as she bites one, carelessly, and lies on an elbow lengthwise so she can observe him using as little strength as possible. "I cannot believe—"

"The words of your Duchess? Everything I say is true. If it isn't, you are to make it true for me." 

Soldiers are used to getting into crappy situations. He stares up at her, punches her floor rug until it dips into the floor wood, and works at getting himself out with the boot.

It takes nearly an hour, but in the end he receives Theodora's kiss on his very sore cock and her fond, fond "Berkut."

 

* * *

 

He's sure the black behind his eyelids has only just caught up with his brain when Theodora jabs him with something hard and freezing. "Shit," he mumbles, "what else do you want from me?"

"What time is it?"

"Time for you to shut up and cuddle like women are supposed to."

He yelps as she nudges him off her lap, rolls and springs up by instinct, and realizes that the movement has woken him up too far to collapse back into sleep. She beams at his expression upon seeing the gun in her hand. "You'll need this."

"Are you kidding?"

As she passes him belt and instrument, he seizes her fingers for an instant. They are warm, and vital, and he hisses as the nails print keen little crescents into his palm shaped very like the malicious twist of her lips. "There are serious affairs abroad tonight," she says, "and you have yet to play your part. Don't shoot blanks, Berkut."

"I don't have any left," he says, stalking away. 

He needs a solid, stupid game, the kind that ends with a dead body and an exultant heart. The kind played with only swords and bullets and goddamn fighters.

**Author's Note:**

> I cope with assignment block by writing rarepair porn, apparently. All kinds of feedback are appreciated. ♥


End file.
